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Academic

: The Yin Blog

Disneyland and property rights in tickets

By Tung Yin

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Due to a family matter, I had to head down to Los Angeles last week, so naturally my wife and I took our two little boys to Disneyland as well. While there, the following two possibly analogous incidents occurred that got me thinking about property rights in tickets.

The first was that we decided to go on California Soarin' (in California Adventures), which is kind of a flight simulator ride with a big curved screen and suspended roller coaster-like seats that tilt with the picture to enhance the feeling of motion. It's a popular ride, so the line gets long, and it's also one of the rides that Disney offers "Fastpass" to mitigate lines for those willing to work. The way Fastpass works is that you insert your park entry card into a machine near the ride, and the machine gives you back your entry card and a ride ticket. The catch is that the ride ticket lets you bypass the "standby" line only for a one-hour period, and that one-hour period is in the future. So, if you visited the Fastpass machine at 10 am, you might be given a return window of 12 noon to 1 pm.

Anyway, we decided to brave the approximately 45 minute stand-by line, but as we were walking up to the end of the line, a woman approached us, asked if we were going to ride Soarin', and when we said we were, she gave us her Fastpass tickets, which we about to become valid. Woo hoo! So instead of having to wait 45-55 minutes, we bypassed the long line and had about a 5 minute wait (basically for the designated simulator to clear out). I'll get to the potential issues involved in a moment.

The second incident occurred later that same day. As we were exiting the park (well before closing time), a young woman approached us and asked if we were leaving. When we said we were, she asked, "Can I have your tickets?" Naturally, we refused. It would have been pointless, since the regular Disneyland tickets require a valid hand-stamp for re-entry that day, and you can only get a hand-stamp if you've already been in a park, which of course requires that you already have had a ticket.

Nevertheless, the woman's request struck me as quite wrong for reasons beyond the pragmatic. It would represent revenue loss to Disneyland, since the only other way she could get in would be to buy a ticket. But then I started wondering about how I was able to Fastpass the Soarin' ride. The lawyerly side of me could respond that there was no revenue loss to Disneyland, since the Fastpasses are free (but you essentially can only have one active at a time). Therefore the situations are completely different. And from Disneyland's perspective, I would think that is right. On the other hand, I suppose the other customers waiting in the stand-by line might have had a complaint, since we (marginally) extended their wait, which would not have happened had we gone through the stand-by line. Then again, the customers were no worse off than if the original Fastpassing woman had used her Fastpass instead of giving it to us, and one can wonder why those customers would care who imposed the marginal increase in wait time. . . .

Full post as published by The Yin Blog on September 11, 2009 (boomark / email).